My Chemical Romance's 'The Black Parade' Reaches No. 1, Twenty Years On
The 2006 album jumped from No. 139 to the top of the Billboard 200 on its 20th anniversary reissue, setting the record for the longest wait for a No. 1 album in chart history.
My Chemical Romance has its first No. 1 album. The Black Parade jumped from No. 139 to No. 1 on the Billboard 200, Billboard reported. The chart is dated November 7.
The album earned 78,000 equivalent album units in the United States in the week ending October 29, according to Luminate data reported by Billboard. That was a 653 percent increase from the week before. Pure album sales made up 68,000 of the total. Vinyl accounted for 42,000 copies, the band's best vinyl week ever. Streaming added about 10,000 units.
Twenty years to the top
The Black Parade came out on October 23, 2006. It debuted and peaked at No. 2. The Hannah Montana soundtrack kept it from the top spot that week, according to NorthJersey.com.
Twenty years later, it holds the record for the longest wait for an album to reach No. 1 on the Billboard 200. The previous record belonged to Toby Keith's 35 Biggest Hits, which took 15 years and nine months.
The band waited longer still for a No. 1 of any kind. My Chemical Romance first appeared on the Billboard 200 with Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, on the chart dated June 26, 2004. The gap to this first No. 1 is 22 years and four months. Billboard notes the band is the third act this year to wait at least a decade from a first chart entry to a first No. 1.
The 139-to-1 jump is the largest climb to the top since Taylor Swift's Fearless (Taylor's Version) rose from No. 157 to No. 1 in October 2021.
A reissue, bought on purpose
The jump was driven by the 20th anniversary deluxe edition, released October 23 through Reprise Records. It came in more than 20 formats and variants across vinyl, CD and cassette. All versions count toward the same chart position.
The expanded edition adds six bonus tracks to the original 13. One is "Someone Out There Loves You," an unreleased song fans knew as "Stay." The set also collects B-sides and live recordings from a 2007 show at Maxwell's in Hoboken, New Jersey.
The album beat Olivia Rodrigo's You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So In Love to the top spot. The reissue also gave the band its first No. 1 album in Britain, on the Official Albums Chart.
The tour that carried it
The band has played The Black Parade in full since July 2025, on the Long Live The Black Parade tour. The run included a five-night stand at the Hollywood Bowl in October. It wraps November 22 in Indonesia.
The Black Parade was the band's third album. It is a rock opera about a cancer patient looking back on his life. "Welcome to the Black Parade" reached No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 in January 2007, the band's highest-charting single in the United States.
Frontman Gerard Way has said the band wants to make a new record in 2027, according to Blunt Magazine. For now, the record they made in 2006 is the one at the top of the chart.
